Yet one cannot be too strict in policing the boundaries between these two levels, for in drawing attention to the poetics of articulation, "Mont Blanc" suggests that philosophical argument inevitably relies on representations of an embodied "I," narrative exempla, privileged metaphors, and repeated terms.

In addition, stories and exempla like those found in moral literature such as Sefer Hasidim, a late twelfth/early thirteenth-century book written by R. Judah ben Samuel he-Hasid (c. 1150 – 1217) and his successors, illuminate different aspects of medieval life and beliefs.

Or this: "A duller load of silence surrounds the bits of Sappho cited by ancient scholars, grammarians, metricians, etc., who want a dab of poetry to decorate some proposition of their own and so adduce exempla without context."